would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed
up of life" (2 Cor. v. 4). It was essential that the Roman should be
able to understand words like these, and to associate them with a
religion which, though in its most vital points one mainly affecting
this life, was also, like those of Isis and Mithras, strongly tinged
with mysticism. "All religions of that time," it has lately been said,
"were religions of hope. Stress was laid on the future: the present time
was but for preparation. So in the mysterious cults of Hellenism, whose
highest aim is to offer guarantees for other worldly happiness; so too
in Judaism, whose legacy has but the aim of furnishing the happy life in
the kingdom of the future. But Christianity is a religion of faith, the
gospel not only giving guarantees for the future life, but bringing
confidence, peace, joy, salvation, forgiveness, righteousness--whatever
man's heart yearns after."[958]

Yet another ingredient was that kindly, charitable, sympathetic outlook
on the world which we found in the poems of Virgil, and which is
associated throughout them with the idea of duty and honourable service.
The husbandman toiling cheerfully and doing his simple acts of worship,
among the patient animals that he loves, and the scenes of natural
beauty that inspire him with pure and tender thoughts; and then again in
the _Aeneid_ the warrior kept true to his goal by a sense of duty
stimulated by supernatural influence: both these sides of the Virgilian
spirit show well how the soil is being prepared for another and a richer
crop. Love and Duty are the essentials of Christian ethics; they are
both to be found in this poet, and through him made their way into the
ideas of the better Romans of the next generation, and so into the
philosophy of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. "To minds touched with the
same sense of life's problems which pervades the poetry of Virgil, the
ideas that came from Galilee brought the rest and peace which they could
not find elsewhere."[959] The early Christian writers loved the "vates
Gentilium," and St. Augustine in particular is for ever quoting him; but
I should be going beyond the limits of my subject if I were to follow
his gentle influence farther down the stream of time.

In my last lecture we discussed the revival of the old religious forms
by Augustus, and the consummation of this work of his in the splendid
ritual of the _Ludi saeculares_. Can it be said that such an